Is it possible to increase the global naval budget?

[captainwrungel]

I've had an idea for a campaign where all nations have their available funds increased tenfold, allowing everyone to start cranking out more ships and leading to much larger, crazier battles. Is this possible? I've briefly browsed through the data files, and I haven't been able to find any entry that determines budget.

[aeson]

If you open RTWGame#.bcs in the Save\Game# directory, where # is replaced by the Arabic numeral corresponding to the save slot, the value for the line FleetSize acts as a global multiplier on naval budgets. Each nation block contains two more lines - BaseResources and BudgetModifier - which also modify their budgets; note that unrest is likely to be generated when BudgetModifier is high, and that in-game events and tensions can change it.

If you want to set this up prior to starting the game, then what you want to look for are the BaseResources and HBR lines in BNat.dat for standard powers or [CustomNationName].nat files for custom powers. These two lines control a power's initial base resources on game (BaseResources) and historical (HBR) budget settings, and the value is in millions of resources. Note that the budgetary influence of resources from colonies is unaffected by modifications to BaseResources and HBR, and that the in-game naval budgets cap out somewhere around 2 billion per year (if I recall correctly, it's specifically int32max, or 2³¹ - 1). Resources from colonial possessions are nominally 25,000 per point of possession value and possession value can be modified in MapData.dat, but I would not recommend it as a possession's value is also its cost to claim at the peace table and increasing possession value by a full order of magnitude across the board will make all possessions except for those that normally have a value of 1 completely unobtainable; those that normally have a value of 1 could still be claimed at the peace table, but only in the event of a government collapse.

Budget computation is roughly [Budget] = ( [FleetSize] / 10 ) * [BudgetModifier] * ( [BaseResources] + [ColonialResourceMultipler] * [ColonialResources] ). The manual suggests that the contribution of colonial resources diminishes later in the game, but at the start of the game [ColonialResourceMultipler] equals 1 and I have not tried to determine whether it changes later on. It is possible that the manual is simply indirectly referencing the fact that a power's BaseResources grow by about 2% per year by base (3% with Rapid Economic Growth, plus 350k/year when RGP1/RGP2 in the nation file do not equal 0).

[captainwrungel]

Thanks, it's working for the most part, although when testing the effects of increasing the budget via increasing HBR and BaseResources tenfold, I found that most nations started out with an immense deficit. Reducing the multiplier to five, and then to 2.5, had an interesting effect where nations like Great Britain, which had a functional budget at 5x multiplier, suddenly started with an immense deficit at 2.5x.

Is there a known formula for the starting funds? The strange issue is that at 3x multiplier, the British start with a deficit of -500 million, while at 2.5x it's -1 billion. 

[aeson]

Mar 22, 2019 14:46:45 GMT -6 captainwrungel said:

Is there a known formula for the starting funds?

Not to my knowledge, but the starting reserve fund is close to four times the starting annual budget, or roughly 7.1 * [fleet size] * ([base resources] + [colonial resources]). Note that that is an approximation, not an exact formula; there is some variation depending on the actual fleet size chosen. Since I did not mention it earlier, [fleet size] is 2 for Small, 3 for Medium, 5 for Large, and 7 for Very Large, and [budget modifier] is 18 at the start of the game.

My guess for why you're getting negative starting funds is that you're running into an integer overflow error of some kind.

[captainwrungel]

That's what I thought when I used a tenfold multiplier, but I must be overflowing and underflowing several times over to get the results I'm seeing with the British starting funds. I think I'll try creating a vanilla save and editing from there instead.